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by starraya



Category: Holby City
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-16
Updated: 2017-04-16
Packaged: 2018-10-19 20:18:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10647309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starraya/pseuds/starraya
Summary: Or five times Bernie holds Serena.





	Home

1.

Bernie has strong arms.

She’s ex-army, for goodness sake. Of course, she’s strong, but her arms, Serena thinks, are quite something. The way her muscles ripple underneath tight shirts. Serena surmised, soon after meeting Bernie, that she must work out. She didn’t quite realise, however, how strong her arms were until the day when AAU had a rather unfortunate patient.

“Looks like a two-man job.”

“Just one strong one.”

They had arm-wrestled over it. Serena had felt Bernie’s strength in the grip of her fingers, vice-like. Felt it go as Serena’s own arm had overpowered Bernie’s – or so she thought.  

“You let me win, didn’t you?”

Only later, when Bernie had proved her strength in theatre, had Serena realised the restraint she’d exercised earlier. Letting her win. Calculating it just so. That required a certain kind of strength too.

Sometimes, however, Bernie doesn’t know what to do with her arms. The day of Arthur’s funeral Serena had broken down in the peace-garden. Bernie had pressed the pads of her finger-tips against Serena’s back, awkwardly held her close. She had leant her head in.

Bernie’s smoke-laced breathes had mingled with Serena’s own breathes.

It was freezing. Bernie had suggested a drink. After Hanseen had saw her, she already decided to thank Serena with a glass of wine, but the offer of Albies is also one of comfort, of care. However inadequately Bernie’s body might express it.

Her hands slip off Serena’s back. They turn back to the hospital and walk back indoors, side by side.

Instead of holding Serena tight, she buys her wine. Warms her up that way.

-

This time she is the one in need of comfort and her arms don’t feel strong. They feel weak. She slumps on the theatre floor and thinks about the man, her friend and colleague, they have just operated on. He survived surgery. Her arms, bloodied from the wrist to the elbow, helped save him. But he’s still fighting. And it’s all her fault.

On her shoulders, she feels the crushing weight of guilt.

Her confidence crumbles. Tears threaten her eyes. But she holds them back, or rather Serena does.

“You are the most fearless, fantastic doctor in this entire hospital.”

And Serena's eyes, wide and earnest and sparkling, pull Bernie in. Bernie’s lips to Serena’s.

Her arm moves too, cautiously and when Bernie draws back from Serena, she leaves her hand resting on Serena’s shoulder. Not holding or clasping or gripping. Just resting. Waiting.

Serena captures Bernie’s trembling lips. Her hands clutch at Bernie’s arm. Her hands grasp at Bernie’s scrubs, not knowing where to settle, but only knowing that they want to tug Bernie closer.

Bernie’s arms recover their strength, their purpose. They move her hand to the back of Serena’s neck. A place her hand will find again when they kiss in their office before Bernie leaves for Kiev, after she returns. Her arms will slide around Serena’s waist. Her fingers will splay out over her back. She will learn every contour and curve of Serena, commit every inch of her lover’s body to memory. She will never grow tired of mapping her out. And today, on the theatre floor, she begins.

-

Months later, in Serena’s bed, technically she finishes. Serena collapses on top of her, panting. She rests her head in the crook of Bernie’s neck. Promises herself she will stay here only until her heartbeat steadies, but Bernie’s arms curl around her back. Entrapping her. Her hands trace delicate patterns on Serena’s back, trailing along the curve of her spine, swirling against the hollow of her back.

(She will never finish mapping Serena out.)

 

2.

  
Bernie's arms don’t feel weak, they feel useless. Her hand skims Serena’s arm, down to her wrist. Serena grasps it tight. Through the window, they watch a surgeon shake his head. Serena gasps and her body sags. Bernie holds on to Serena hands, keeps her own arm steady and firm. They isn’t a trace of a tremble in her fingers.

Bernie’s holds on, but already the tie between them is loosening. Unravelling. Already the woman she loves is collapsing inside out, already she is tumbling down into depths Bernie can’t follow her.

Already she is lost.

  
3.

  
Serena wakes up without Bernie’s arms around her, again. (Her choice – the sixth, seventh, eighth night she’s pushed Bernie away and Bernie’s let her.) She wakes up, hungover, the empty bottles of wine from the night before stuffed in her beside cabinet.

Bernie wakes up her, gently. Perches on the edge of Serena’s bed and strokes her fingers through Serena’s hair and murmurs words to coax her out of sleep. Serena has curled herself, foetal-like, under the duvet. Bernie wants to crawl underneath and wrap herself around Serena and mould their bodies together.

Bernie wants to lie next to Serena in the bed they shared lifetimes ago (one week, six days ago exactly) when the windows were clouded with mist and the pavements outside frosted with snow and they agreed that they weren’t leaving the bed all day (or rather Serena suggested, advising Bernie against hypothermia and Bernie replied with a kiss, soft as a drifting snowflake, that turned into another kiss, and another, and another.)

Bernie remembers that day, two days after Christmas. There is no snow anymore. It’s all gone. Just rain, wind and hail. She’s read the forecast. They will need umbrellas. She has found out Serena’s scarf, gloves and coat. All black. Just like Bernie’s own clothes.

Bernie swallows down a lump in her throat. She wants to wind the duvet around them and forget the outside world. But she can’t. Serena cracks open one tired eye to see Bernie’s hair is brushed, military straight. It looks wrong.

She raises herself slowly onto one arm and sees her dress, washed and ironed, hanging on her wardrobe door. She wants to fall back down in bed, but Bernie presses a glass of water into her hand.

Serena raises it to her lips and sips. Bernie presents her with toast. Serena eats mechanically, from memory. The toast is dry and clumps in her mouth like dirt. She manages half a slice.

This is a dream. Just a dream, she thinks. And all she must do is get through it. There is more wine in the fridge. There are sleeping pills in the bathroom cabinet if she needs them tonight. This is a dream. And it will run its course, Serena thinks. All she must do is let the day carry her body like a river and it will be all over. Serena’s blinks out sleep from her eyes. Rubs them with her hands and sits up. Drinks.

Bernie ends up dressing her for the most part. She zips up Serena’s dress and ties the knot of the sash when Serena’s hand won’t stop trembling. She finds Serena’s new reading glasses (she will need them for the hymns) and hands them her. Serena's eyes are dry as glass and void of any light. She doesn’t recognise herself in the mirror – maybe it’s the new glasses, maybe it’s the meals she hasn’t been eating and the way her dress is just a little too loose on her.

Her face isn’t her own. It’s hard as marble and white as death. And it stays like that, frozen, when they are in the car, at the church, listening to the ceremony.

Later, they trek over sodden clumps of grass. The wind shoots pin-prick thin raindrops at them like darts. Her body is shaking, but her face is still as hard as marble and white as death.

Through a rip in the ground, they lower her daughter.

Serena sinks to the ground. Would, if Bernie’s wasn’t behind her. If Bernie’s hands didn’t seize her waist and cling tight. Keeping her up. She slumps in Bernie’s arms, but Bernie clutches tighter. Her hands lock beneath her breasts, just underneath her heart. A bandage for the bleeding organ, but it doesn’t bleed anymore. It’s carved out. There’s nothing left inside.

Nothing left but the one terrible noise that falls from Serena’s mouth, as her knees give way, as she sobs.  

Howls.

  
4.

  
Bernie pulls the collar of her coat up close to her throat and mourns for the scarf she forgot. She treads snow into the floor of Albies. It’s February the 10th and the forecasters were wrong. Very. They’d had three inches overnight and more is on its way right now, flying down thick and fast. The entire sky is white.

Albies is warm and crowded, but Serena isn’t here. Anywhere. Bernie searches. Asks after her. Admits a loss, but not a defeat. She blows into her hands before she starts the car again. Mourns for the gloves she forgot again in her haste after receiving Jason’s worried call. She turns the steering wheel and pulls out the car park.

She doesn’t like driving in the snow. A couple of months after her driving test, she skidded on some ice and ended up off the road. No broken bones, but hideous whiplash. And an even more hideous jump in her insurance next year. The accident was over thirty years ago now, but Bernie still struggles not to flinch when she remembers that feeling, that utter loss of control. Of surrounding to fate – and sheer luck.

She wouldn’t drive in the snow for several years, but it grew unpractical. She grew out the fear. But a little vestige of it remained.

She was a little afraid of driving in the snow. There.

That’s what she should have said when Serena, she can’t remember why or when, teased if the big macho army medic was actually afraid of anything.

There’s what she should have said. She’s afraid of driving in the snow. It could have been another little of piece of herself to give to the woman she loves. A secret she hasn’t told anyone else, for fear they would think it silly.

Bernie Wolfe does feel fear. She is afraid of a lot of things. Losing control, like during the accident.

Losing other things.

Bernie parks outside the second pub in Holby, smaller, dirtier. Darker. The blackness of the room hits her immediately on entry, but even without searching, without asking, she knows Serena isn’t here. She feels it in the pit of her stomach. But she checks. Double cheeks. Looks outside in the beer garden, the smoking area, the ladies’ bathroom.

Serena isn’t here.

Bernie trudges through snow and climbs back in her freezing car. The heating decided today of all days to go cactus.

Bernie drives to the edge of the city. To a pub she hears before she sees. Drunken men spill out onto the street, babbling nonsense. Cheering, it seems, at each other’s inebriated idiocy. A couple to the left of Bernie are shouting, seconds from a brawl. She darts inside the pub, pulling the collar of her coat up this time against the stench of ale and sweat and goodness knows what else. A scatter of whistles follow her inside, and any other day she might feel tempted to whip around, and fix the idiots with a death-stare or a few choice words, but tonight she has one thing on her mind.

One woman.

And she finds her. Nursing shiraz in a corner of the pub. Clearly drunk. A man, bald, fifties, marginally better looking than the men outside shares the table with Serena. Bernie doesn’t like the ways his eyes, black and small as beads, are fixed on Serena. Her shirt is slipping off one shoulder, but his eyes are looking at the skin somewhere else.

She sees him shift closer to a laughing Serena. That’s when she spots that his arm is around her waist. She wants to break in it half, but it will have to wait after each of his fingers. He has moved his hand onto Serena’s thigh.

Bernie marches over. Furious. she fights to keep her voice steady.

“Serena, it’s time to come home.”

“What are you,” the man looks Bernie up and down. “Her childminder?”

Bernie shoots a stare at the man, one with less respect in than she would give a flea.

“Nagging wife, more like,” Serena says.

Bernie does her best to ignore the comment.

“I’m her partner,” she states, folding her arms.

“Yeah right,” the man says. “No offence sweetheart, but you lezzos aren’t hard to spot. And I don’t often make the mistake of tryna lay one.”

Bernie’s hand fists around the man’s glass of beer. Every nerve in her body wants to throw it, but instead she resists. She clutches the glass, knuckles white. She leans down, one hand pressed against the table.

“Firstly, get your hands off my girlfriend and secondly, listen up, you creep. My name is Major Bernie Wolfe. I have just returned from serving in Afghanistan, before that it was Iraq. I have seen men shot and killed and blown to pieces. I have had them die in my arms. Good men. Men who fought for your pitiful excuse of an existence. Men with far bigger balls then you’ll ever have. I know how to load a rifle in seconds, and more importantly I know where to get one. And I never forget an enemy face. Now get your hands off my girlfriend, and kindly fuck off back to whatever hole you came from.”

The man stands up, releasing his grip on his Serena.

"I’ll ‘ave ya," the man stutters, "reported to the police." 

Bernie just relinquishes the beer glass, stepping back from the table to take Serena’s hand. Before she can, Serena has swiped the glass and thrown it over the man. More specifically, over the centre of his trousers.

“You know,” she says, “for an old lezzo I do have a remarkable grasp of the male anatomy.”

Bernie hooks her arm in Serena’s and turns her around at this point to stop any further altercations.

It is only when they make it through the pub and to the car park that Bernie sees just how drunk Serena is. She can barely walk straight and clings onto Bernie for support. Bernie encircles Serena’s waist with one arm and helps her to the car.

“You’re freezing,” she tells Serena, unbuttoning her coat and wrapping it around Serena, before wrapping her arms as well around Serena. Clutches her fiercely. There is more anger than comfort in the hug. And of course, underneath that anger, is fear. Still thudding through Berne’s veins.

When she withdraws, she doesn’t rest her forehead against Serena’s like she will do four days later, after Serena loses it in theatre, loses herself, and looks at Bernie eyes lost and searching, asking her if she will come over later, and Bernie, without hesitation, gathers Serena up in her arms.

Bernie opens the car door for Serena and shuts it after Serena climbs in.

“Let’s go home.”

She slides into the driver’s sheet. Curses. The car refuses to start. It whimpers pathetically. Shudders. Stops. Shudders.

By the time Bernie resigns to call a taxi, after deciding that she’s not waiting for hours for the breakdown service in a car without any heating in this weather, Serena has drifted asleep.

Bernie waits for the taxi in silence. Her fingers find Serena’s, curling around her cold hand. Trying to warm it up in her equally cold one.

 

5.

She has missed this. God, has she missed this. Missed Bernie.

Nestled between Bernie’s legs with her back pressed against Bernie’s front, Serena cants her hips. Meets the thrust of Bernie’s fingers. She is close and Bernie knows. She moans as Bernie tugs at the hardened peak of her nipple, before rolling it between her thumb and forefinger.

God, has she missed this. 

Bernie’s curl inside her and Serena’s head lolls back against Bernie’s shoulder.

“Come for me,” Bernie’s breath is hot against her ear. “I’ve got you.”

Serena falls apart in Bernie’s arms.

Afterwards, Serena turns around to cup Bernie’s cheeks with her hands and draw her in for a long kiss.

Her aeroplane touched down in England well over ten hours ago. She surprised Bernie and Jason one day early, at Holby.

Bernie was coming out of theatre. She had spent hours swith her hands in the abdomen of a young woman, who finally, finally, had stabilised. She had many more hours of the day left to trudge through. She was hoping to gain a moment of peace before the red phone inevitably rang again in her office, but she couldn’t enter the room. Someone was stood in the doorway, blocking her path.

Serena in a new blouse. Tanned. Hair cropped shorter than usual. Streaked with silver. 

“Hello stranger,” Serena smiled.

All the tiredness vanished from Bernie's face in an instant. And all thought too for where she was. She ran and scooped Serena up in her arms. Just managed ot resist lifting her off the floor and spinning her around in the middle of AAU.

It has been nine hours since then. Three hours since Serena stepped through the doorway to her home, Bernie’s hand in hers. Two since she sat down to fish and chips with Bernie and Jason, the three of them tucked in at the kitchen table, chattering away. 

It has been, what seems like hours but is minutes, since Bernie pressed her against her bedroom door, _their_ bedroom door and started tearing at Serena’s blouse whilst pressing her lips to her neck and murmuring how much she liked the new haircut. The new colour.

It is only now, though, as Serena pulls back from her kiss, her hands still cradling Bernie’s face, it is only now as she looks into Bernie’s eyes, and Bernie smiles, whispers “your home” – as if she can barely believe it, as if it is a prayer she never thought would be granted, but wished for every single night – it is only now that Serena truly feels certain to smile back and say: “I’m home.”


End file.
